Language eBook

IX

HOW LANGUAGES INFLUENCE EACH OTHER

Languages, like cultures, are rarely sufficient unto
themselves. The necessities of intercourse bring
the speakers of one language into direct or indirect
contact with those of neighboring or culturally dominant
languages. The intercourse may be friendly or
hostile. It may move on the humdrum plane of
business and trade relations or it may consist of
a borrowing or interchange of spiritual goods—­art,
science, religion. It would be difficult to point
to a completely isolated language or dialect, least
of all among the primitive peoples. The tribe
is often so small that intermarriages with alien tribes
that speak other dialects or even totally unrelated
languages are not uncommon. It may even be doubted
whether intermarriage, intertribal trade, and general
cultural interchanges are not of greater relative significance
on primitive levels than on our own. Whatever
the degree or nature of contact between neighboring
peoples, it is generally sufficient to lead to some
kind of linguistic interinfluencing. Frequently
the influence runs heavily in one direction.
The language of a people that is looked upon as a
center of culture is naturally far more likely to exert
an appreciable influence on other languages spoken
in its vicinity than to be influenced by them.
Chinese has flooded the vocabularies of Corean, Japanese,
and Annamite for centuries, but has received nothing
in return. In the western Europe of medieval
and modern times French has exercised a similar, though
probably a less overwhelming, influence. English
borrowed an immense number of words from the French
of the Norman invaders, later also from the court
French of Isle de France, appropriated a certain number
of affixed elements of derivational value (e.g., _-ess_
of princess, _-ard_ of drunkard, _-ty_
of royalty), may have been somewhat stimulated
in its general analytic drift by contact with French,[164]
and even allowed French to modify its phonetic pattern
slightly (e.g., initial v and j in words
like veal and judge; in words of Anglo-Saxon
origin v and j can only occur after
vowels, e.g., over, hedge).
But English has exerted practically no influence on
French.

[Footnote 164: The earlier students of English,
however, grossly exaggerated the general “disintegrating”
effect of French on middle English. English was
moving fast toward a more analytic structure long
before the French influence set in.]

The simplest kind of influence that one language may
exert on another is the “borrowing” of
words. When there is cultural borrowing there
is always the likelihood that the associated words
may be borrowed too. When the early Germanic
peoples of northern Europe first learned of wine-culture
and of paved streets from their commercial or warlike
contact with the Romans, it was only natural that they